July 3, 2006

Worst bug in Dapper

I had to break with my “Some interesting…” title tradition. “Some interesting worst bug in Dapper” simply makes no sense at all😉

If you sort the Installation and Upgrade section according to most views (or to most replies) like this.

Then it becomes evident that the “booting stalls during mounting root filesystem” bug is by far the biggest showstopper.

This bug is probably (most of the time?) related to people who have both SATA and PATA controllers on their motherboard. The bug shows both after upgrading and installing. The bug manifests itself in different ways and has different solutions. So it’s also possible that this is a class of related bugs or something.

What happened in my case :

For me my /dev/hda became /dev/hde after upgrading. On a fresh install I could produce exactly the same results. To solve it I had to edit my /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.1st accordingly. Each time a new kernel gets installed I have to edit my /boot/grub/menu.1st again and change /dev/hda for /dev/hde.

See for example a part of my /boot/grub/menu.1st :
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-25-686
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-25-686 root=/dev/hde6 ro vga=0x31a
quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-25-686
savedefault
boot
Mind the line :"root (hd0,5)".
So grub needs the (translated) parameter /dev/hda6 while the kernel
needs it to be /dev/hde6.

But as I have said before. This bug manifests itself in different ways and has different solutions. I compiled a list with some fixes.The last thread is the big discussion thread where people post their problems.

The HD was on the “ITE IDE controler UltraDMA 133/100” and the DVD on the “Intel ICH7 DH South Bridge UltraDMA 100/66/33”.

Saddly, only the “Intel ICH7 DH South Bridge UltraDMA 100/66/33” seem to be linux bootable (Windows XP x64 boots corectly). So the LiveCD boots (from “Intel ICH7 DH South Bridge”, install, but when I shutdown, the machine “trys” to boot from “ITE IDE controler” but can’t.

The workaround I used was to install normally with the livecd, shutdown, switch cables between the HD and DVD, and then boot into linux…